by Jennifer Popa

a lyric biography for Jill

The girl and her sister commit their first crime together. Plucking plums
from the neighbor’s tree. Plums which they did not ask permission to take.
Plums purpled with sunshine. Plums who waited so long to be plucked they
sometimes released their grasp on the branch, chucking themselves to the
earth. A thudding sacrifice. Plums calling out to the girl who is allergic to
bananas. It is a plum day for picking plums, the plums say. Who was she to ignore
a plum? A plum asking to be loved by a mouth. A plum with the whole of its
family looming below. The rot of their cemetery. Each folding in upon itself
on a summer afternoon in Texas. On account of the neighbor’s inaction, on
account of the waste, the two girls pluck. Only later do they learn they are
thieves.

It’s no surprise the thieving child becomes a thieving adult. Only she does
not steal. She simply suspects herself of guilt over her blessings. For a time
love only hung around in two-week increments until one stopped liking the
other. Then a man splits her life into the before and the after. She does not
trust that she is her husband’s favorite. Sometimes she wonders aloud why do
you love me? She is insistent in the question. He is insistent that she stops
asking it, insistent that she is so much. You just are, he says. She is
unaccustomed to being anyone’s favorite.

Someday she might have a baby, or she might not. If she does it will only be
for curiosity’s sake. She will not tell it that being a human is a fucking nightmare,
will tell no son that we must live so long aware of our own deaths. But when the son
inevitably learns this truth, she will teach him the trick of sleep. Teach him to
tell himself stories in the maw of night. Never anything interesting, only dull
imaginings. She will teach the child that if the brain marvels too long,
insomnia invites itself in like an ugly lover on a lonely night. If the child
cannot sleep, she will feed him sliced plums. Each alternating: sweet then
sour. She will insist he is her favorite and it will be true. She will never worry
that she will stop liking him.

Jennifer Popa is a short story writer, essayist, and occasional poet. She earned her Ph.D. in English at Texas Tech University and did her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She now works as an Assistant Professor at Gannon University where she is revising a collection of short stories and a novel. Some of Jennifer’s most recent writing can be found at The Florida Review, Bellingham Review, Moon City Review, West Branch, Ninth Letter, and Sundog Lit. She can be found at www.jenniferpopa.com.